Editorial ‘Art Monthly Australia’ November 2012

Hunter Valley (Cessnock)-based artist Dani Marti is also preoccupied with details (and mediums) most intricate, but his field research takes place in wholly human habitats, usually on society’s fringes, often laden with ideas of self and (inter-) subjectivity, and often with a deliberate blurring of ethical and moral boundaries. Marti’s work, generally multi- channel video projections and large woven ‘painting/portrait’ constructions, is ‘characterised through a struggle to mimic and document human intimacy’, write Una Rey and Fay Neilson in their lead article this month which starts out with his first public gallery survey exhibition last year at Newcastle Art Gallery – closed three weeks into its two-month run because of a nearby row of historic but ‘faulty’ fig trees.

Somehow, this botanical impasse seems to encapsulate the transgressive intent of Marti’s oeuvre, as though the foundations it seeks to shake are so embedded, socially, that his work almost defies ‘nature’. And yet nature, ‘human nature’ – warts’n’all and highly aestheticised, sex and death, living and dying – is clearly at the heart of Marti’s quest which pans out through a number of related articles in this issue: Carrie Miller on Marti’s more recent Mariposa exhibition; Andrew Frost’s vivid Super 8 Sydney memoir; Macushla Robinson’s examination of Francis Bacon’s female nudes; Stella Gray’s ‘Strange [queer] encounters’; and also in Melissa Watts’s poetic response to the Capturing Flora exhibition, Reproduction – Eucalyptus pyriformis. Honing in on one historical and one contemporary rendition (both by women) of the same genus, Watts’s poem traces the changing aesthetic of botanical art with, like Marti’s work, a wonderfully charged and intricate sexual pulse.

Yours (in plume), Maurice